February 26, 2014 | Talana Lattimer

We urgently need advocates to contact their state officials and ask them to vote against the amended SB 1531!

Senate Bill 1531 - Allows cities to outright ban medical cannabis dispensaries and requires childproof packing. This bill was amended and passed unanimously by the State Senate to replace language authorizing bans to allow cities and counties to pass “reasonable regulations” around time, place and manner.

Talking points against the dispensary ban amendment to 1531:

Patients deserve equal access to medicine.

1531 as passed by the State Senate unanimously allows cities to reasonably regulate time, place, and manner of dispensaries

3460 requires pages and pages of regulations that dispensary operators must adhere to including compliance checks, testing standards, background checks, labeling information and much more.

These amendments might have unintended consequences, like empowering a city or county to try to ban other types of health care facilities such as clinics that offer abortion services, drug treatment centers and similar entities.

Talking points for child proof packaging

We don’t require this level of packing for any other products including alcohol, cigs, or prescription pills

If this amendment merely required the OHA to develop packaging standards that might be okay. However, adding in sections that specify certain types of packaging that have no basis in research or fact is simply wrong.

For example, requiring a heat sealed bag makes no sense since once opened it offers no protection against a child getting into it.

Some patients would have trouble opening some types of packaging. It should be their choice what type of packaging they want.

It is the parents job to be responsible and keep their medicine out of reach from their children.

Most children are either too young to know what a package of medical cannabis looks like, or old enough to figure out how to cut through a plastic bag.

Phone Script:

“Hi, I am _______________, a constituent in your district. I wanted to let you know that I oppose SB 1531, which would require childproof packaging, as well as allow cities and local governments to outright ban dispensaries has legs in Salem.

If passed, this bill would effectively negate HB 3460 in places where dispensaries have already had a tough time setting up shop. Dispensaries outside of Multnomah County are vulnerable to having to duke out their right to exist within their own city. Allowing local governments to circumvent the intention of HB 3460 will lead to a medical cannabis scene that looks a lot like California, where local governments and dispensary owners have been duking it out for years.

Furthermore, allowing for local governments to ban dispensaries increases the possibility that the federal government would work with those localities to raid dispensary owners that try to withstand those bans.

This is why we need all dispensary owners and stakeholders in the Oregon Medical Marijuana Program to contact their representatives in Salem, and let them know that the State of Oregon has decided that cannabis is medicine. Local governments driven by ideological viewpoints, and political agendas, shouldn’t be allowed to deny patients equal access to a medicine their doctor (and the State of Oregon) says works for them."